Libyrinth

by Pearl North

  “And the wind blows right through us.”

  The wind grew stronger still, and with it came a roar the likes of which she’d never heard before. She turned and looked up and saw what everyone on the ground had already seen: a golden crescent, flying overhead like a swift and errant moon. As it barreled past them the noise became unbearable. Reflexively, Haly ducked. The flying machine swooped and banked over the gathered multitude and she found herself gaping along with everyone else. It turned again and flew straight for the Horn of Yammon. From the underside of the flying machine burst a beam of blue light that struck the bell of the horn. With an ear-splitting crack, the horn shattered.

  Clauda’s Redemption

  Clauda-in-the-Wing waited until the Ilysian army was near the Libyrinth, but still on the other side of the low hills facing the front gates of the library. While they were still hidden from view of the Eradicants, she flew to the back of the Libyrinth in a high, wide circle, being careful to remain out of the enemy’s sight. And then she descended upon them.

  There was a thing they had: a great iron horn. The part of her that was the Wing of Tarsus smelled it as evil and the part of her that was Clauda of Ayor knew that it was their greatest weapon. So she struck that first.

  It was a simple matter to unleash the Sword of the Mother. Every speck of anger and fear that she had felt—from the first Eradication she’d witnessed at the age of three to the atrocities that had occurred in the vault—was already burning bright white and hot blue within her. All she had to do was let them go. And she did and they flew out of her in a concentrated beam of rage that sliced through the air, burning dust particles as it went. It struck and the iron horn shattered with a satisfying crack. Her soul gloated over the great spinning chunks of metal and the black-clad figures scattering to avoid them.

  Clauda-in-the-Wing climbed higher, saw that the Ilysian army was almost at the top of the ring of low hills surrounding the Libyrinth, and wheeled and darted down to strike a wagon that was full of the jagged smell of gunpowder. It exploded, too, and she found another, and another. Righteous anger raced along her veins and brought a glow to her metal skin. She felt something akin to joy.

  In a vast white wedge, the Ilysians descended upon the crowd gathered around the Libyrinth. And the Eradicants, caught unprepared, struggled to form ranks and meet them. They were only partially successful. While Clauda-in-the-Wing wheeled and banked and struck another ammunition wagon, the Ilysians broke through the Eradicants’ hastily formed line. The sounds of rifle fire, the crackle of mind lancets, and the screams of humans and horses prickled on her skin and she twitched at the sting of it.

  Clauda-in-the-Wing swooped and fired at another wagonload of ammunition. It went up like the others had, in a triumphant blaze, but this time a man ran from the burning wreckage. He was on fire. His screams raked her golden skin and the feeling might have been horror and it might have been sharp delight at the downfall of an enemy. But the Clauda part of her knew that it was horrible. He ran as if he could escape the burning flames but they were all around him. He twisted and fell and rolled but he just kept on burning. His screams dwindled as she flew away, but the image of his contorted body, twisting in the orange fire, stayed with her.

  On the ground all was chaos as Ayorites ran in every direction, screaming, trying to avoid the Ilysians, who now focused their wrath upon the Eradicant soldiers, pressing them back and back, toward the walls of the Libyrinth.

  A man driving a cart full of roasted corn found himself suddenly in the midst of the Eradicants’ retreat. As the black-garbed soldiers melted away around him, he came face-to-face with the bulk of the Ilysian force. He lashed frantically at his ox, but the animal balked, terrified by the noise and the smell of the fighting. A young boy sprang from the back of the cart, wielding a pitchfork. A woman ran after him, crying out for him to stop. But the boy threw himself at the nearest Ilysian, who cut him down with a sweep of holyfire from her weapon. The woman ran to his fallen body and fell beneath the hooves of the Ilysians’ horses as the unit parted and flowed around the wagon.

  This was what she had intended. These Eradicants and their Ayorite followers were enemies of the Libyrinth. The wing wanted to strike at them. They were a black mass of Enemies, but Clauda didn’t want to see another person burning. She didn’t want any more to die. She fought against the urge to bank and turn and strafe the man in the wagon. The wing’s will to do so was a tangle of black twisting threads all around her and she fought against them. The lines lashed her with fire and the horizon tilted and she realized that she was falling.

  In reflex she swerved and swooped, righting herself as she targeted a family desperately trying to get out of the way of the advancing Ilysians. She watched them as they fled, but she managed not to fire on them. It was the wing. The wing was a machine of war and it wanted to kill. She couldn’t let it.

  The curving lines wrapped around her and she tried to twist free of them, but the more she struggled the deeper they dug into her, searing her with white-hot fire. She was no longer one with the wing. It wobbled and started to fall.

  Where there had been song, there was now screaming. From the parapet of the Libyrinth, Haly watched Singers and Ayorites run from the falling shards of the ruined horn. The gold crescent flying machine darted back and forth while several wagons filled with rifles and ammunition exploded. Beyond the chaos, a thin line of white appeared on the horizon and grew with tremendous speed, like a second dawn. Banners waved above them, emblazoned with the red bull of Ilysies.

  Haly turned to Selene, who stood a little bit away from the chorus. A feral grin lit Selene’s face as she met Haly’s eyes. “Clauda,” she said. “I knew she’d think of something. I wonder how she managed it? But that doesn’t matter now. The important thing is that we’re saved. Look!” She pointed to where more Ilysians converged upon the Singers and Ayorites who were massed before the front gates. “There’s no escape for them.”

  “No!” shouted Haly. “This is not good news!”

  Siblea was at the parapet beside her, looking down on the battle now raging. “They did not go to the Corvariate Citadel,” he said, and looked up at Selene. “You knew they had not gone to the citadel.”

  “I knew nothing of the kind, but I believed,” said Selene.

  Siblea’s lip curled and he shoved Haly to one side and lunged at Selene, reaching for her neck with those long arms of his. “You Ilysian bitch!”

  Selene stepped to one side and drew her knife, and the next instant the two of them were rolling around on the ground, an undifferentiated mass of black robes, punctuated occasionally by a hand or an ear or the bright silver gleam of Selene’s knife.

  “Stop it!” yelled Haly, but they didn’t pay any attention to her.

  Behind her, the Chorus of the Word was breaking up as Baris tried to go to Siblea’s aid and Burke tried to stop him, and Jan tried to go to Selene’s aid and Rossiter tried to stop him. Everyone was shouting words like “Eradicant” and “lit.”

  “The horrible words, mocking looks, and accusations which are leveled at me repeatedly every day, and find their mark, like shafts from a tightly strung bow,” said the diary of Anne Frank.

  If this kept up, they were all going to kill one another. “Stop! Everyone! Stop this now!” Haly yelled, but it didn’t do any good. No one was listening.

  Everything she had worked so hard for, all the good that she’d been so determined to see in the people around her, that she’d needed to see in order to survive—in order for all of them to survive—it was all being destroyed. They were destroying themselves. Haly felt as if her heart would explode with the agony of it.

  “I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart,” the diary of Anne Frank told her. Haly opened her mouth and a sound came out. It was partway between a wail and a shout and it sounded like the first thin strains of the Song. Realizing this, she kept it up. Maybe if they heard the Song . . .

  Burke looked a
t her, and so did Rossiter. They seemed to collect themselves as they looked around and tried, in turn, to get the others to stop fighting. Haly kept singing, but the Song was not for one voice alone. Burke and Rossiter seemed to realize this, and they joined her, but three were not enough, either.

  Baris straddled Jan, punching him hard in the face. Selene got her knife free at last and raised it high above her, poised to stab Siblea in the chest. Burke and Rossiter and Haly stared at each other in dismay and their voices faltered.

  And then something changed. Every book, every voice that had whispered, murmured, spoken to Haly her whole life, suddenly began to sing. She knew at once that Gyneth had finished his repairs and powered up the Libyrinth. At first she nearly fell from the force of it as the voices of the Libyrinth’s books combined to form a harmony she knew very well—a harmony that united the ocean tides and her beating heart. It was the Song, and it was inside her and outside her and she opened her mouth and it poured forth from her.

  Just as she had discovered at the citadel, one did not need to know the Song in order to be affected by it. Baris and Jan looked up at her, their faces full of awe at the sound issuing from her mouth. She knew what they were feeling. She felt it herself, that sense of union with all things—including one’s enemies.

  Baris and Jan stared at each other. Did they see themselves? They appeared to be surprised to find their hands around each other’s throats and they let go. They helped each other up and they joined Burke and Rossiter as they sang along.

  Soon everyone on the rooftop had abandoned fighting and taken up the Song. Haly could do nothing but let the sound pour through her, but Selene and Siblea came to her and turned her to face the parapet. They guided her forward and the others came, too, and they all sang with everything they had, in hopes that it would reach those who were in battle on the ground.

  But with despair, Haly saw that they were not heard, and the battle raged on.

  Breathe, Clauda told herself. Breathe. She stopped struggling against the lines that enwrapped her. She took deep breaths and she thought of Selene standing in the library. We want to live, she thought, and she felt the wing trying to pull out of the spiraling dive they were in. The sky, she thought. We love the sky and we love to fly in it. And that was something that she and the wing definitely agreed upon. Together they strained for the sky.

  Clauda-in-the-Wing felt as if the effort would pull her apart, tear her wings off, and buckle her spine. The ground was approaching faster every second but at last she was able to force her way through the momentum of the dive and pull up. She grazed the tops of a cluster of abandoned tents as she did so, but her metal hide was strong. And then she was soaring up again, up into the sky. She flew high, and the farther from the battle she got, the less impulse she felt to use the sword. She looked down, taking a survey of the battlefield. The Eradicants had rallied and reformed in a defensive line behind which chaos reigned as Ayorite peasants sought to flee the battle. They were protected for now, but if the Ilysians broke the Eradicant line again, they would be trapped between the advancing army and the walls of the Libyrinth. Clauda did not think the Ilysian soldiers would differentiate much between Eradicant soldier-priests and their untrained followers.

  But what could she do? Was not the wing a machine of war? At the thought, the part of her that was the wing quickened with purpose and it took all the willpower Clauda had not to dive and launch another attack. She flew higher still and turned her attention to the limitless dark above the blue sky, hoping that in that void, and far from the smell of fear and death below, she might be able to think.

  Adept Ykobos had said that the wing had many uses. For example, it could heal her seizures and hear the books in the Libyrinth. What else could it do?

  As she thought about that, banking around and around the Libyrinth and trying to figure out how to stop this war that she’d started, something changed. What she had been hearing from the Libyrinth, the multitude of voices, all speaking at once over and around one another in a great babble—suddenly the voices merged and became one great voice lifted in the most beautiful sound Clauda had ever heard. If the sensation of being inside the wing had a sound, this would be it. Clauda didn’t understand it, but the part of her that knew the spiral language of the wing recognized this song as the ocean from which those curving lines and peaks of intention sprang. This was the source; all-nourishing, all-loving, whole, and able to make whole all who heard it.

  Integration. That was what this was. It was integration on a grand scale. The ultimate goal of the teachings of kinesiology was to bring the individual mind into alignment with the body and thus with the world around it. When all was in synch, when communication flowed effortlessly from mind to heart and from brain to eye, then nothing could be wanted, nothing could be feared, because all was together. And in that awareness of the unity of all things, desire and fear and pain became meaningless and fell away. There was no need for worry ever, because moment to moment, everything needed was present either in oneself or in the environment—self and environment being one and the same.

  Clauda scanned once more the ground below her, half expecting to see the Eradicants and the Ilysians dropping their weapons. But no. The battle raged on and then she understood why. They couldn’t hear it.

  The wing has many uses. The wing has many uses. The words repeated themselves over and over again in her mind. Was there a way for the wing to let everyone hear what Clauda heard? She had no idea. The wing’s powers were based on light, not on sound. And yet she heard . . .

  The Sword of the Mother was a concentrated beam of light. Could it be made diffuse instead? Could it be modulated to carry a signal, instead of concentrated to bring death?

  She banked and rolled and thought about a great canopy of light; soft, lambent light like that which bathed her inside the statue. She rolled onto her back and released the light up into the sky.

  The first time, the sword shot out and up into the air and she was glad she had thought to turn over. She tried again, concentrating on the idea of a fierce, narrow river flowing out from its canyon into a wide and placid lake.

  As Clauda-in-the-Wing released the light once more, it was at first the raging torrent of killing energy, but then it broadened and softened until it was a dome of luminescence emanating from the belly of the wing. Light like the kind that surrounded her in the statue. Her joy tripled with the rush of rediscovering more of who and what she was. The wing was. She and the wing were.

  When she had held the dome of light for some time, when she was sure it would not revert to the sword, she rolled back over and the light streamed down over the Libyrinth and all those who surrounded it.

  The fighting stopped. Everywhere, people were dropping their weapons and reaching out to each other, helping those whom a moment ago they had sought to kill. Clauda-in-the-Wing felt relief and a growing sense of pleasure at having remembered her ancient ways.

  But the fact that the light was now also encompassing the Libyrinth had unexpected consequences. The song went on, flooding through all her energy pathways. She felt as if she were being rocked on the ocean, enwrapped in the wing’s light, floating, dreaming, singing. She was singing. Everyone was. Below, everyone was looking up at the sky with open mouths, their voices taking flight. Everyone was singing the same song at the same time, and though Clauda did not know this song, she did not need to. It was as if her body knew it, as if the air around her and the soil below her knew this song, had known it all along, but until now had been unable to voice it.

  The song came stronger and stronger and the air filled with the curving tendrils of its notes, like the lines of light inside the statue of the wing. These new lines in the sky grew brighter and brighter and the song grew louder and louder and more joyous. Clauda realized they were caught in a feedback loop between the Libyrinth and the wing.

  The energy was ramping higher and higher and soon it would overwhelm them all and incinerate everyone in a bonfire of ecstasy
.

  In panic Clauda reached out for something she knew, and what she found was the voice of one book, her most favorite. “And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was as still as a meadow in evening, with the sun streaming in on the people there and the wind moving among them as if they were only tall blades of grass,” said The Cricket in Times Square.

  Dovrik had an Ilysian pinned to the ground and was about to smite her with his mind lancet when he heard the Song. He glanced up and what he saw took his breath away. The sky was filled with streaming, curling, curving rays of light. It was the Song made visible. He dropped his mind lancet and stood. It was the Redemption.

  Galatea struggled for the knife at her belt as the Singer reared back, his mind lancet poised to strike. And then came a sound unlike any she had ever heard before. It came from the earth and the sky, and in the sky was written the name of the ocean in golden, swirling lines. The man on top of her dropped his weapon and stood, and she knew this was her chance to drive her knife into his belly but this sound she heard stopped her. They were all one in this sound. It would be her own belly she opened.

  Ock huddled beneath the overturned cart and cursed his greed for bringing him here. Tala had been all for it. She had insisted that they come for the Redemption, and that they bring the boy, too. Now his wife and son were both dead. Ock’s only reason for joining the pilgrimage was to sell roasted corn to the faithful, yet here he was, still alive.

  When the first few notes of the music reached his ears he thought this was some new weapon of devastation. But then the sound seeped into him and he knew that it was the Song. The one the Singers taught the villagers about, those who came to their services. He had never believed. As the music swelled, the sounds of fighting died out. Cautiously he poked his head out from beneath the wagon and beheld lights in the sky, like golden serpents flying through the air, twirling and undulating as they went. The sight brought tears to his eyes. The Redemption. It was real.